After domestic disputes with a girlfriend, he was convicted in 2005 of felony harassment and violating a no-contact order, and was sent to Pierce County Jail in Washington state for eight months. He was in a holding area with inmates about to be released when a corrections officer held him back.

Castillo was handcuffed and whisked off in a van to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. A federal officer said records showed he was an illegal immigrant.

[Snip]

Castillo went before an immigration judge, who appeared via video conference, a common procedure in the crowded immigration court system. Again, he claimed citizenship. The judge didn't believe him. He was ordered deported on Jan. 24, 2006.

ICE says cases like Castillo's are extremely rare; human rights organizations say otherwise. But the real value of a story like Castillo's lies in the picture it paints of how clumsy, disorganized and overburdened our immigration courts can be—just one indication of the need for immigration reform. A database of all legal citizens and legal aliens doesn't exist, and those suspected of being an undocumented immigrant don't have the right to an attorney during their hurried hearings.

This week, the Obama administration outlined, albeit broadly, its proposal for immigration reform, which would include a national database to check the immigration status of workers. That would, at the very least, be a start; cases like Castillo's would probably diminish completely if such a database were created. But it's only one of the problems of our broken immigration system.

Obama says he wants to take on the issue this year, a move one anti-immigration advocate said would be "politically disastrous." But the question of what to do with our undocumented immigrants—a bloc whose population shrank last year but still numbers 12 million people—is so contentious I doubt there's ever a good time to tackle it. The looming census complicates the issue even further: Parts of the right have alreadyaccused Obama of wanting to pass immigration reform before 2010 to create new Democrat-friendly districts with heavy Latino populations. They forget, though, that Latinos aren't a Democratic monolith.

Dan and I reported that over 100 former congressional staffers and executive branch employees -- including some extremely well-connected people -- have left public service and are now lobbying on behalf of the zombie banks being kept afloat by your tax dollars. Despite Obama's efforts to change the revolving door culture of Washington, the huge gobs of money being handed out by the federal government these days means the Capitol Hill/K Street connection is more prevalent than ever. As Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation told me when we were reporting our story, "It has not gone unnoticed by special interests or K Street firms that there is a bonanza there."

It hasn't gone unnoticed by former congressmen and senators, either. According to Bloomberg, a full one-quarter of lawmakers who retired or were defeated in 2008 have moved to K Street. There is absolutely no concern anymore for the ethical questions that move creates. Bob Kaiser, author of So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government, gave me a great bit of historical context on this when I did a Q&A with him in March. I find it fascinating. I think you might, too.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., riding a rising market, is considering making a multibillion-dollar offering of its shares to investors as part of an effort to repay a $10 billion government loan, according to people familiar with the matter.

...In October, the Treasury Department forced the nation's largest banks, including those that didn't need additional capital, to take government funds. Goldman received $10 billion....Goldman executives privately say the firm doesn't need new capital to pay back the loan but doing so would signal its financial health.

Let's not shilly shally here: I don't believe a word of this. If Goldman could pay back the loan, which they only received six months ago, they'd just do it. Conversely, there's simply no way they'd try to raise private capital in the worst environment for stock offerings since the Depression unless they really needed the money. What they say "privately" to the contrary isn't worth the paper it's not written on.

Democrats are sure to incite Republicans if they adopt a shortcut that would allow them to pass major health-care and education bills with just 51 votes in the Senate, where Democrats are two seats shy of the filibuster-proof margin of 60 seats. The rule, known as "reconciliation," would fuel GOP charges that Obama has ditched bipartisanship.

"If they exercise that tool, it's going to be infinitely more difficult to bridge the partisan divide," said Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (Maine), who was one of three Republicans to support the economic stimulus plan.

Media Matters took them to task for failing to note that Republicans themselves — including Snowe — have used reconciliation in the past, most notably to pass George Bush's 2001 tax cuts. The lefty blogosphere piled on, and this afternoon, in an online chat, someone asked Kane if he wanted to defend himself. He replied:

Paul Kane: I'm sorry, what's to defend?

Someone tell Media Matters to get over themselves and their overblown ego of righteousness. We reported what Olympia Snowe said. That's what she said. That's what Republicans are saying. I really don't know what you want of us. We are not opinion writers whose job is to play some sorta gotcha game with lawmakers.

That's what columns and blogs are for. Look, Republcians will take reconciliation as a serious poison pill to Obama's so-called bipartisan/post-partisan era. The Republicans did this, in the most direct correlation, with welfare in the mid-90s. And Democrats took it as a vicious partisan maneuver.

That's what is happening, that's what we reported.

Feisty little devil, isn't he? But here's the question: are Post reporters obligated to mention past Republican support for reconciliation every single time they quote a Republican who now opposes it? Here's the Post's history over the past couple of weeks: they ran a roundtable on the subject in March that gave space to all sides; Shailagh and Kane themselves wrote a feature about reconciliation last week which dutifully pointed out that Republicans have used it in the past; and over the same period there have been several other pieces in the Post that mentioned reconciliation in passing, some of which brought up previous Republican support and some of which didn't.

Is that kosher? Or does it need to be included in every single story? I'm hard pressed to believe that it does, any more than, say, Barack Obama's primary opposition to a healthcare mandate needs to be religiously brought up every time a healthcare story mentions the subject. Or, more to the point, the fact that Democratic opposition to reconciliation when Republicans were running the show has now morphed into support. Let's face it: if reporters are required to spotlight every single instance of hypocrisy whenever they quote a politician, there won't be room in their stories for anything else.

So, sure, reporters ought to hold Republicans like Snowe accountable. But I'm not sure I see the case for insisting that they have to do it in every single piece they write. It's a history of one-sidedness that's a problem, not the fact that some stories contain more detail and context than others.

By the way, Kane's entire online chat is worth a read. His answer to the reconciliation question wasn't a sudden outburst of spleen against liberals. He gives as good as he gets with everyone. Besides, anyone who refers to Alberto Gonzales as "Fredo" can't be all bad.

(On the other hand, his answer to the question about defense spending was pretty incoherent. He definitely seemed a little unclear on the concept.)

Social media, that dastardly upstart of a content type, is a little like a cocktail party: occasionally interesting and usually full of people you sort of know. Social media aggregators, on the other hand, are more like boozy pubs: entertaining and loud.

Forthwith, 10 links this week from Digg and Reddit that I found informative and deliciously strange. This (and every) week's meme: the internet! Think of social media aggregators as newspapers that report on the internet as if it were a place. That's right, kinda like a bar and kinda like a newspaper. Enjoy.

First, there were all of those "slanty eye" photos that circulated during the Beijing Olympics. Not okay. Then teen uber-sensation Miley Cyrus thought it would be funny to pose thusly, and it still wasn't (she apologized, twice). A regrettable trend, but maybe one that we could chalk up to athletes caught up in the moment and Hannah Montana-ness?

Well, today Texas state Rep. Betty Brown suggested (out loud, during House testimony) that Asians should adopt names that are “easier for Americans to deal with.” (There's no accompanying photo of her making slanty eyes, that I have seen.) Brown was responding to testimony from Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans, who was explaining to legislators the challenges Asian Americans face in voting and in obtaining identification because their legal transliterated names are often different from a common name they use on official forms. Brown thought she would help out:

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?...Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

Wow. So helpful. You must have suggested that because you have helpfully shortened your own name from Elizabeth (long and full of syllables, I know) to the much more accessible, Betty. And Brown is a color, and one syllable, and so easy to say, like Bush! But Betty, if your name weren't Brown, but instead you (or your husband) descended from a long line of, say, Bartholomews, what a pain in the ass that would be if you ever wanted to become a poll worker, huh?

Here are two miscellaneous factlets that have caught my eye recently. First up is On The Public Record, who is reading The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster:

DAMN! Cities NEVER give up. Like, ever. You cannot raze a city so bad that it goes away. Like, some study showed that between 1100 and 1800, only forty cities stopped existing. I suppose that makes sense. I mean, the fact of a city not existing is so powerful that we remember it forever: Atlantis, Babylon, whatever that one was that got volcanoed. I’ve been wondering if New Orleans and Galveston will be the leading edge of a new era of cities vanishing. We’ll know in a generation, I guess.

Well, there's always Carthage. It can be done as long as you're single-minded enough about the project. Next up is Mark Kleiman, exploding an urban myth about marijuana cultivation:

Cannabis is not "the largest cash crop in California." That zombie statistic has a history: during the collapse of the lumbering industry in the early 1980s, the Ag Department county extension agent in Humboldt County, which grows timber and pot, was so angry about the suffering he saw around him due to unemployment among loggers that when he filled out his annual estimates of crop-by-crop revenues for his county he listed pot as #1, using a completely made-up number. Dale Gieringer of California NORML then projected that out nationally to show that cannabis was the nation's #2 cash crop, ahead of soybeans but behind corn (or maybe it was the other way around.) Since then, another NORMALista named Michael Gettman has produced even more fantastic numbers. In fact, the Abt Associates estimate put the total retail value of the cannabis trade at about $10b, about 15% of the total illicit-drug trade. That's retail price, not farmgate price. And not all of that is grown domestically; some of it comes from Mexico, from Canada, and from Jamaica.

No special axe to grind on either one of these things. Just thought I'd share.

The myth about salting the earth, etc, for Carthage is just that — a myth. Yes, the Romans trashed it, but it was such a logical trading spot that it was rebuilt, and by 400 or 500 AD it was a wealthy city again.

OK, so Carthage doesn't count. Or does it? If you destroy a city, drive out all the people, reduce everything to rubble, and then repopulate it a few decades later with your own people, is it really the same city? Or is it a different city of the same name in the same place? Hmmm. Is there a philosopher in the house? Did Shakespeare really write all those plays? Or some other guy named Shakespeare?

Remember back in February, when Bill Clinton urged Obama to be more “upbeat” about the economy? Clinton actually implied that the new president could be making the financial crisis worse by being honest about how bad it was, thereby rattling public confidence—and with it, the market. You’d have thought the primary campaign would be enough to convince Obama that nothing good could come from Clinton homme. But the president has clearly taken a page from Clinton’s playbook. He now largely avoids statements that might frighten the horses in favor of cheerful declarations that we are at “a turning point in our pursuit of global economic recovery,” while at the same time promoting the latest bank bailout plan, which he says will get us there.

There are plenty of reasons why its wrong to try to buoy up a sinking economy on a raft of positive rhetoric—among them, the fact that it obscures what actually happened in the past, and clouds our judgment about what should be done to “fix” it. In the current issue of Newsweek, Daniel Gross comments on the Orwellian linguistic feat by which the government seeks to rebrand the piles of worthless crap created by our financial system.

Remember those toxic assets? The poorly performing mortgages and collateralized debt obligations festering on the books of banks that made truly execrable lending decisions? In the latest federal bank-rescue plan, they’ve been transformed into “legacy loans” and “legacy securities”--safe for professional investors to purchase, provided, of course, they get lots of cheap government credit. It’s as if some thoughtful person had amassed, through decades of careful husbandry, a valuable collection that’s now being left as a blessing for posterity.

According to this morning’s New York Times, the administration is now taking things a step further by promoting a plan that would let us ordinary folks buy what are being called “bailout bonds”—shares in mutual fund-type bundles of lousy mortgage securities. These are supposed to eventually become profitable, thereby allowing us to share in the wealth. But of course, they could also go the other way. As the Times notes: “If, as some analysts suspect, the banks’ assets are worth even less than believed, the funds’ investors could suffer significant losses.” In other words, having been screwed once by Wall Street, we’re now being asked to bend over for a twofer—which some people just might do, if they believe the rhetoric that happy days are about to be here again.

Another point of view came from William K. Black, who was the chief federal regulator during the S&L crisis, in a long interview with Bill Moyers on Friday. Black calls Bernie Madoff a “piker” in comparison with the Wall Street giants that committed mass fraud, and are now nonetheless raking in government funds. When Moyers asks Black “why the bankers who created this mess are still calling the shots” instead of being fired like the auto executives, Black mentions the close relationships between Washington and Wall Street, which applies to Tim Geithner and Larry Summers as much as to Henry Paulson. Then he talks about what he doesn’t hesitate to call a “cover-up”:

We liberals are our own worst enemies sometimes. Take climate change. For over a decade we've been promoting the idea of cap-and-trade as a way of dealing with carbon emissions, partly for technical reasons (unlike a carbon tax, it imposes firm caps) but also — in fact, mostly — for pragmatic and political reasons. A carbon tax, even if it has some theoretical advantages, is unlikely ever to happen. We all know why. Cap-and-trade, because it uses market mechanisms, has a proven track record with acid rain control, and raises money via auctions rather than taxes, has at least a fighting chance.

So now that liberals are in control of Congress and the White House and have an actual chance to pass legislation, what happens? Everyone starts talking about carbon taxes instead. Because, you know, in some theoretical economic sense you can argue that they're more efficient. It's enough to make you scream sometimes. At least, that's what it did to David Roberts, who must have been reading my mind after digesting Tom Friedman's most recent column:

So now, on the cusp of an enormous fight against dishonest and well-funded proponents of doing nothing, Friedman decides it’s time for “an alternative strategy, message and messenger”? Are you f*cking kidding me?! The only conceivable effect Friedman’s endorsement of an alternative bill can have is to divide support and distract attention from the best chance for a serious energy/climate bill in 30 years. His timing could not possibly be worse.

I’m sure Friedman would respond that hey, he’s not a Democratic operative. He’s an independent thinker. He’s under no obligation to stump for a bill that doesn’t make his mustache tingle. And in this he’s like all progressives. They all want to be the Smartest One in the Room. None of them want to sully their purity by compromising or rowing in the same direction. They all want to show how you clever they are, how their pony plan, their messaging, their strategy is the one those silly legislators ought to be using. Meanwhile, the coordinated opposition kicks their ass, over and over again. But at least they’re clever!

Be sure to read the rest of the rant. As David points out, the key part of cap-and-trade is the cap, not the trade. And contra Friedman, it's not hard to explain a cap on carbon. In fact, it's a lot easier than trying to explain why a tax will reduce global warming. Here's the elevator pitch: "We're going to reduce carbon emissions by setting a nationwide cap on carbon emissions." See? It's easy!

It's true that the trade part of cap-and-trade makes things more complicated, but it's not all that complicated. It's just designed to lower the cost of complying with the cap and make everything a little more efficient. Still, the cap is the key. And as for complexity, anyone who thinks that a carbon tax — an actual, real-world carbon tax, not the chalkboard variety — would be nice and simple, hasn't been paying attention to the way Congress has been making tax policy for the past 200 years. "Simple" is not a word that usually gets used in the same sentence.